The Last Victim
by Buttly
Summary: Before the disappearance of a child rocked the city of Hillwood another child had already faded away to no consequence. Years later, that child, now a teenager, hunts down his last victim before his body and mind fail him. Inspired by the fan fiction "Missing" by Missie2 check that one out, when you can.
1. Chapter 1

The fire billowed upwards into the night sky. It blended into the darkness and disappeared into nothing. He threw the special power into the fire. His hand crumbled away ever so slightly as it moved like paint chipping off an old house. The fire grew into a bright green, lighting everything around it in a sickly glow. He looked down at his hands; they had the consistency of an erased doodle in the margins of a child's school paper. There was a small brightly colored drum and drumstick lying in front of him. He looked back into the fire and he saw people he knew when he was younger in a world that no longer belonged to him. Everything he lost and everything that never belonged to him to begin with. He remembered all their faces so well beyond what they remembered of him. A kid with a big gut, a rich girl, a short girl with glasses, a tall kid with an accent, the list goes on. It was not really their fault they did not know him anymore. He had been fading for such a long time. Each year there was a little less of him but he knows for a fact that he was never really there at all.

The fire switched to two final people, a kid with a wide head and a girl with a bow. Two haves of the same coin of what makes the world complete. He stared at the girl especially who had been gone for so long. He remembered the first time he saw her, all mad and hateful towards everyone that she crossed paths with only to hide and confess her undying love in secret for the boy she loved.

He looked at her in longing.

The words were not for him, oh no. They were for the kindest soul he had ever met, the only one to on those rare occasion speak to speak to a ghost like him. The words were unconditional and sweet, and she would go on and on as if to remind the world in some small way that it was beautiful because a human being was capable of such love for another.

He lived to hear those words. They kept him grounded to this world and it distracted him all the darkness in it. She loved that boy with the wide head and there was nothing in this world more beautiful than that.

She would hit him during the brief times when he could hear her say those words. Right square in the face and often broke his glasses. He deserved it of course, those words were sacred and he was not worthy. How he loved it so, it was only thing to remind him that he was still in this world, that bit of pain he felt to remind him he wasn't completely numb. It was often the only attention he received on some days and it made him cherish it all the more.

He picked up the drum and drumstick and started a steady beat. He stared at the two in the fire. The wide headed boy and the girl who loved him. He remembered when she began to give up on herself. When she stopped trying to tell him how she felt. That was when he began to vanish quicker. The monologues became fewer and the world began to crumble. Voices from other places would whisper to him and he began to see demons sprout in between reality. As he faded, the cracks in the world became wider and filled with horror and confusion. It was as if her love was the linchpin to the entire universe. He wanted to help that girl so she wouldn't give up on her love.

But he was too weak. The drum beat became quicker.

He remembered when his parent left one day and didn't come back. He couldn't tell anyone as he had become silent and his reality was melting. He wished the day his voice went away was a hard one but nobody noticed but him. The ground became no longer tethered to him and sometimes heard horrifying words directed towards him. Those same words continued to break him further when he heard them spoken toward her.

The drum beat faster and an incantation silently passed his lips. He was lost and he could not find his way back. Everywhere was madness as the different worlds he saw clashed and oozed together like a melting chocolate bar sticking out of a collapsing human face being swallowed by a vortex of every star in the sky. He was too sick and wretched to be her guardian any more. He fell further and further into that bottomless void. By the time he finally made his way back she was gone and stolen away.

He had utterly failed her and now that happiness that he wished she would attain in this life was drifting into the world of dreams. She disappeared and the Earth became broken.

"But not anymore." He mouthed the words so quiet only the spirits could hear them. He beat on the drum faster and his lips quivered with the silent spells he was speaking. He couldn't find her, his body and mind were too much like vapor to try. The world may disappear from him but he knew he was not the hero of this tale.

The drum beat more furiously and the two figures merged into one being. The road was forming. His arm became a smear of chalk and eraser shavings. The path was there and the fire exploded as if it was alive. Several beasts began to watch him from the flames, their faces scowling and their eyes a great emerald. They babbled into his ears until it became deafening and he could feel there words ripping him apart from the inside out until there was silence.

He stopped, the deed was done and there was nothing more he could do. The way to each other was made. He hoped one of them could make the journey. He thought of the kind boy that the girl loved and he hoped that he could finally find her. If anyone could finally bring her the peace she deserved it was him.

He watched the fire until it died down into small green embers, the markings around it made it the pupil of a great eye. His dreams told him about it and the voices babbled on about the rituals in great detail, but still the secrets of it eluded him and he could only see the faint echo of some unknowable place deep in the jungle.

He bent over and coughed and wheezed, sending his whole body into a spasm, his body rebelling against him for nearly a minute. It left him panting harder than before. He stood up not bothering to wipe his mouth. He thought again about the eye and he hoped he could find out about it in another life.

He looked off into the swirling miasma that was the horizon. There was girl standing in front of him holding a baseball bat. She was smirking at him and had her other hand on her hip. Her eyebrow was cocked as if waiting for him to say something.

There was the sound of a gunshot and the girl's head exploded into a thousand bloody pieces.

He watched the brain matter and other bloody chunks fall to the ground slowly. The gore drifted down like macabre confetti as he continued to wheeze loudly. After they stopped coming down he began to walk. There was one last thing he was going to do, a selfish desire that he wanted to fulfill, something for him and him alone.

Time breezed by on his trek. The hours disappeared every time he blinked and the ground was like a river pulling deeper downstream. Sometimes it was not even clear if he was even moving and the images of different places seemed to flash in front of him. By the time he made it to the house he was looking for, he did not even realize his feet were blistered and bleeding. He was not sure if this was the right house or even the right person. He wasn't sure of anything anymore but he continued on because it was all he could do.

He unlocked the door and walked it as if it was nothing. He looked around the house. The place was well kept but Spartan in its furnishing. There were no pictures on the walls and the place seemed to lack color. The furniture was plain and nondescript and the living just had a couch, a coffee table, a rug and a small TV. The only thing that was of note was the thin, bedraggled bag lady in thick round glasses currently scowling at him.

"I hate her. I hate her so much!" The woman screeched and began clawing at her face. "I fucking hate her. I'm going to kill that bitch. I'm going to fucking kill that bitch." The homeless woman began to peel her face off like it was a bloody banana.

"I'll get you one day, I'll fucking get you," under the face lie another face. The face of a young blonde woman with short hair and thick mascara running down her cheeks from shed tears.

"I'm going to make you pay, Olga Pataki! Mark my words; I will make you fucking pay!" The blonde woman screamed. Spittle flew out of her mouth which began to foam like a rabid animal.

He ignored the woman and continued on his way.

His footsteps were a quiet but his breath became louder with each step. By the time he reached the man's room the noise was comparable to a chainsaw in volume. He saw him sleeping there with his face like a billion other faces on the planet but he knew that if he were to tear it away that he would be looking at an image of himself, a sick diseased thing. He knew it was pure evil and so familiar ever since he first saw that face. It was a man no one noticed but it was a man who brought him eternal torment.

He did not know when how he found himself on top of the man's sleeping form and his mind was a complete blank when he snaked his thin fingers around his neck. All he could see was that face and he thought up about every ounce of agony it brought him. He didn't care if it did not bring him relief; he needed to feel that neck flesh against his hands. It was the kind of selfish blankness, an instinctual rush that he knows only bad men feel.

He squeezed the man's neck with more strength than he actually had for he was not using his muscles. He was using his hate.

The man's eyes shot open and bulged out of his head as the hands tightened their grip around his neck. The man saw the ghoulish figure on top of him, a young teen with cracked and taped up glasses, an oily mop of hair, and skin caked in grime and sweat. His eyes were bloodshot and carried a malice that the man could not comprehend. There was a bit of dried blood staining the corner of his mouth and teen's yellow, rotten teeth gnashed as he tried to strangle the life out of the man.

The man's fist shot into the face in front of him before his assailant's putrid odor finally reached his nostrils. The teenager's head shot back, his nose bloody and his glasses fell off his face, but the boy was no stranger to being punched and only responded by squeezing the man's neck harder.

The man thrashed in his bed. He sent another blow to the neck of the teenager on top of him causing his wheeze to stutter into a gasping choking noise. It loosened his grip just enough for man to slip a couple of fingers under his assailants grasp.

The man grabbed him by his shirt collar and flung him off of him like he was a wet napkin into a plain dresser.

The coughing teen hit the corner of the dresser with his temple and crumbled to the floor. Before he could get could get up a foot came crashing into his stomach. His body lifted off the ground from the force and he slammed back into the wooden dresser behind him. He the felt his long greasy hair get pulled up and before he could think, his face smashed into the dresser's wooden surface. The young man tasted more of his blood and he spat out his front teeth. He felt an arm reach around his head and cut off his oxygen supply. He gasped and clawed at the stronger man's arm. His vision began to fade; he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small metal fork. He jabbed behind him and felt it connect. The man screamed.

He turned around to see the fork sticking out of the man's leg. The teen reacted swiftly and grabbed the only other weapon he had from his coat pocket, a palm sized rock that used to be a pet when he was younger. He rushed at the man with the rock held high. The man grabbed his arm before he could strike and pulled the fork out of his leg.

He then pushed the fork deep into the teen's throat.

The man pushed him back and the teenager fell to the floor, blood gushing out of his neck.

Everything was becoming hazy and blurry. The young man only saw one thing clearly and it was the last thing he ever needed to see.

It was a girl with her hands on her hips, scowling at him.

He smiled for the first time in years and then he was gone.

The man looked at the wound on his leg and cursed at his own sloppiness. He couldn't believe he let such a scrawny twerp get the better of him like that. He looked at all the blood on the carpet and the crumpled body in front of him. The teen was bone thin and his face was nearly unrecognizable from the beating it received. He scratched his head at the thought of such a sickly twig of a person could put up a fight as well as he did.

 _What a mess,_ He thought. He was hoping to take care of the lunatic without ruining his carpet but it looked like that was out of the window.

After the man caught his breath he went to go hunt down his first aid kit. He disinfected and bandaged his wound before coming back into his bedroom to deal with the body. He recognized the young man in front of him from his trips in town. He would usually see him walking the streets swatting at some unseen foe or digging through a trash can. He was notable among the rift raft as looking more like a foreigner. The man wondered how the street person got inside so quietly. He had always made sure to lock all of his doors before he went to bed.

The man decided he would check before he would leave tonight and see if there need to be any improvements in the security of his house. He mused if he should even start placing booby traps.

Lost in thought, he walked to the living room and grabbed a large rug he had on the floor he rolled it up and brought it into the bedroom. He then walked to his front door. He noticed each one of his locks was undone and his jaw dropped in confusion. Even the locks that couldn't be picked such as the chain and the bolt he installed were undone.

 _I must have forgotten to lock them_ , he thought to himself baffled. He couldn't believe he would forget something like that but that was the only explanation that his mind had that made sense.

He opened the door and moved his truck to the back yard. He did not think anyone would see him move the body but he wanted to make sure. He went back inside and came back to his bedroom.

He unrolled the rug and placed the corpse inside. He then noticed the unsettling smile on its face.

"Creep," he said under his breath, wincing slightly from the pain in his neck.

He rolled the body up and placed it in the back of his pick up. He drove off to some secluded no man's land. It was a little bit of a drive but, he always thought it was good to thorough. He disposed of the body like he usually did and drove home thinking about what he was going to cook for breakfast.

It took awhile for his throat to heal and he thought it best to lie low for awhile, but eventually he was back up to his normal self. He did not even so much as have a limp. By the time the law came for him for the other stuff he had done in his past, it was as if nothing had happened that night. His only reminder that the whole thing wasn't just some crazy dream was a small scar on his leg.

….


	2. Chapter 2

They never found the body, it vanished just like the person it belonged to but a series of events happened brought the young man who died that night into the conversations of the living.

The first thing that would happen would be the finding of the body of a woman deep in the wilderness of Alaska by a film crew hoping to produce footage of a wilderness show. The body was well preserved and hadn't been mangle too badly by animals. It was concluded that women died from exposure but no one ever figure out how she ended up there. It was the first of many mysteries. The woman had been swiftly identified for she still had her wallet and purse. It was if she decided to just up and go for a walk in the frozen wilderness. It wasn't known how she ended up there, her last known neighbors lived thousands of miles where she lived and hadn't seen her in seven years. Her only living relative was her son, who was nowhere to be found.

It was the first time someone noticed he was gone.

His neighbors and classmates thought he moved. No one was close enough to know what happened to him. His mother had very few friends in the office she worked at and none of them very close. She kept a picture of a blonde college aged girl with her eyes crossed out in her desk. There were reports from around the city about a boy in distress walking the streets but no one was ever found.

There were a few reports of young man, too young by many people's books walking the streets or in homeless shelters in several places across the country matching his description from before but no one managed to put the two to two together for a long time. His presence faded once again behind the mystery of the frozen woman in Alaska.

Until a few years later, a metal detector enthusiast discovered a metal box buried in southern New Mexico, close to the Mexican border. The box was full of scribblings, drawn pictures of green eyes some of which were quite ornate, A few pictures, and journals. There were only three pictures in the box, one was a class picture of a bunch of elementary school children, another was of a pasty skinned kid standing with a woman with thick glasses and the last picture was of a girl in pink looking at a locket while standing behind a trash can. The journals told stories, many of which were fantastical in nature. Some of the things written within were quite erratic and told of things that did not exist in this plane of reality. Other times the words told stories of living on the streets, sometimes with a mother but in other times she wasn't there. In a very few occasion it mentioned a city called Hillwood and some fond memories there. There were a few recurring characters amongst the madness that journals described, a lost love, a boy with a wide head, a tribe in the jungle, a mother that accidentally named him "Brain" instead of "Brian" and the face of a terrible man.

They were the books of a lunatic and they read like a fever dream to the man who found the box but he did not give it to the police until he found a letter with a name he recognized.

The letter read:

 _Dear Helga,_

 _I know you are probably not in this world anymore. I failed my promise to you. That you could end up happy, but you are gone and there is nothing I can do about that anymore. The spirits keep pulling me towards them, away from you. They keep whispering things to me and showing me things I do not want to know of. Everything is disintegrating and I keep falling further down into the puddle. That ooze is breaking my body apart and my mind is becoming soup. I can't keep walking much longer, my being is failing. The shadows and spirits have been telling me of magic. Magic that has eyes of green. They swirl with truth and they lead you to peace. Oh god, I hope it helps pull you to where peace lies. The demons have screaming horrible things as they cook my alive. It's all I can do now. I can do no more, forever._

 _I'm going try to kill a man named Curtis Waring. I have to. His face haunts me. Every time mine peels away, I see his face staring at me. I feel the fangs hidden away and know his true name, the Devil himself, Asmodeus. He has been birthing the demons that have been torturing me ever since I saw his face. That horrible face. I am too weak to hurt that evil but I need to see him suffer. It will be my vengeance. I'm a bad person, I'm sorry. I can't help it anymore, I need release. I hope you can day forgive me for my faults._

 _I will be dead after I meet him, no matter what happens._

 _I love you Helga G. Pataki, I always have and I always will. I know your heart belongs to another and I beg you to never give up on that love no matter if you are in this life or the next. It is precious and beautiful. I hope he finally gets to see it. Nothing that beautiful should ever go unseen._

 _I will see you later or maybe not. I am not one to know._

 _Love,_

 _Brain A. Flippote, Aka. Brainy._

Things began to come together after the box made it back to society. A teacher identified the hand writing, the mystery of a glasses lens and a tooth found in a murderer's house became something of more interest, a book was made with the writing in that box, a person was convicted of another crime, and finally someone was real again. Many theories continued, things such as aliens, government cover ups, the occult and different dimensions became common talk in relation to the original owner of that box but they all lead to one thing, a dead teenager, forgotten and unloved.

So reader, I leave you with one final scene.

A figure placed her flowers next to a headstone and wiped her eyes. She stood there for a while in silence before walking away.

The name on the head stone read: _Brain Arnold "Brainy" Flippote_ in big bulky letters. There was an epitaph underneath it, a written challenge to the world.

 _Forgotten once, but never again._

 _AUTHOR'S NOTE: Welp readers, I hope you enjoyed this story. i wrote this story to be kind of set in Missie2's "Missing" fan fiction which you should check out for being friggin cool but could be interpreted as its own thing if it helps or heck, the whole thing might be a dream. Who knows? Not me... I might write some more stuff involving Brainy since I found him fun to write for a stand alone project or maybe not._

 _Anyway thank you for reading this, Missie2 for inspiring me to writing this and Craig Bartlett for, uh, also inspiring me to write this._


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